Why do People Participate in Small Online Communities?
Why do People Participate in Small Online Communities?
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DOI：
10.1145/3479606
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发表时间：
2021-08
影响因子：
--
通讯作者：
Sohyeon Hwang;Jeremy Foote
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
Sohyeon Hwang;Jeremy Foote
在线社区的许多好处-例如获得新的信息、机会和社会关系-随着规模的扩大而增加。因此，一个“成功的”在线社区通常会唤起数十万用户的形象，从业者和研究人员都在寻求设计方法来实现增长，从而取得成功。另一方面，小型在线社区成群结队地存在，随着时间的推移，许多社区仍然很小。在由数十万个社区组成的非常受欢迎的讨论网站Reddit上，我们进行了一项定性的访谈研究，考察了人们如何以及为什么参与这些持续较小的社区，以便理解为什么在流行的方法认为它们是失败的情况下，这些社区仍然存在。通过20次访谈，本文做出了几点贡献：我们描述了小社区如何为参与者提供独特的信息和互动空间，他们被社区的超具体方面所吸引；我们发现，小社区并不促进强大的二元人际关系，而是促进基于群体的身份认同；我们强调，参与小社区是管理参与者在线体验的更广泛的持续战略的一部分。我们认为，在线社区可以被视为嵌套的利基：嵌入的、复杂的、共生的社会信息生态系统的一部分。我们建议，社会计算研究可以从更仔细地考虑不同规模的在线社区规模之间的相互依赖中受益。
Many benefits of online communities---such as obtaining new information, opportunities, and social connections---increase with size. Thus, a "successful'' online community often evokes an image of hundreds of thousands of users, and practitioners and researchers alike have sought to devise methods to achieve growth and thereby, success. On the other hand, small online communities exist in droves and many persist in their smallness over time. Turning to the highly popular discussion website Reddit, which is made up of hundreds of thousands of communities, we conducted a qualitative interview study examining how and why people participate in these persistently small communities, in order to understand why these communities exist when popular approaches would assume them to be failures. Drawing from twenty interviews, this paper makes several contributions: we describe how small communities provide unique informational and interactional spaces for participants, who are drawn by the hyperspecific aspects of the community; we find that small communities do not promote strong dyadic interpersonal relationships but rather promote group-based identity; and we highlight how participation in small communities is part of a broader, ongoing strategy to curate participants' online experience. We argue that online communities can be seen as nested niches: parts of an embedded, complex, symbiotic socio-informational ecosystem. We suggest ways that social computing research could benefit from more deliberate considerations of interdependence between diverse scales of online community sizes.